Now it’s a religious war

Here’s what MSNBC reports regarding the newly passed bill “to protect the pledge of allegiance.”

The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., said America was a nation of God-given inalienable rights and that’s why the country is in a war against “radical Islamists.” Democrats wouldn’t want to “cut and run” in Iraq, he said, “if they understood the importance of those basic principles and that inalienable rights are impossible without a recognition of God and that’s why the pledge bill is important and not irrelevant or trivial.”

Nothing about WMD.  Nothing about creating a democracy for Iraqis (now that we know how they’d vote). 

For Akin, by the way, there’s only one true version of God.  The Christian version.  In fact, Akin has shown support for  Christian Reconstructionism, a movement calling for the intentional subordination of American civil law to biblical law.  Other members of this organization have called for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of “unchastity before marriage,” among other moral crimes.  Akin personally attended the April 7, 2005 gathering of the Christian Reconstructionists to give a welcome message (Tom Delay gave a welcome by video hookup).

Your tax dollars at work.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Erika Price
    Erika Price

    Wait wait wait. Akin slams on the "radical islamists" for neglecting natural human rights, and he represents the opinions of an organization that favors the death penalty for unchaste women?? That sounds a lot like radical Islam, Representative.

  2. Avatar of highandmighty
    highandmighty

    Having read the bible, I have seen no God given inaliable rights. God used the Jewish tribes to kill and destroy, and when they displeased him, they were made to suffer also. There are no rights implied in the Bible. I am always amused at the language structures we create to manufacture convinient reality. The pledge was not written by our founding fathers or by anyone in that generation, but was written in the late 1890s and not intoned in our nations classrooms until the 1950s. Another example of societal programming. It has now lost its emotion, if it ever even had any, and is mindlessly droned out, heedless of what it even means.

    Our founding fathers knew of Buddhism, Hinduism, Judiasm, Islam, and realized that religion played an important role in keeping the masses pacified, and could serve as a rallying point around which to sway the populace. Christianity just happened to be the cultural norm of those early settlers. Religion is useful as a control tool, to go along with philosophical systems and/or law. As such, I have few issues with religious expression, unless weilded by such as Akins. Imagine, to suggest the death of some voters for sexual considerations. If these reconstructionists want to stop homosexuality, perhaps they should pay more attention to pedophelia, a known cause for same sex orientation in some. Or perhaps rape, a reason many women get abortions. I don’t hear cries for the stoning of pedophiles or rapists in their mantra.

    Why the big hang up over sexual issues?

  3. Avatar of highandmighty
    highandmighty

    Correction. The pledge was used in classsrooms starting in 1892. The phrase,"underGod" was inserted in 1954. Speed readers have been known to crash occassionally

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